2ndovc wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 7:49 am
I enjoyed the feedback Guys!
I'm not going to abandon my autos over one incident, but just thinking out loud.
jb
Over 40 years of shooting and carrying, and just plain being around guns a lot, I have seen failures and jams with every single type of gun. Even revolvers can jam or have problems. A high primer will or can shut you down as well as just one grain of unfired gunpowder under the extractor of a double action revolver. Still, I would probable give the edge to revolvers once proven to be reliable, to keep working, but I have seen several new out of the box revolvers with issues, that had to be addressed.
Semi-autos, I have seen more issues, but many were very reliable. And freak things can happen. I have a Colt .380 that has been very reliable, and I usually pocket carry it, with the hammer down on a loaded chamber for condition 2 carry, but I decided to try a nice holster one day, CCW, and chose to carry it cocked and locked, and after carrying it all day, I decided to walk out to my little shooting area in the back yard and fire a few rounds with. So, for my first shots, I decided to draw from the holster, and dump the clip into a target. When I pulled the trigger the first time, all I got was a click of the hammer falling, no bang. The problem was that because the slide is not locked when the safety is on, with this gun, unlike a full sized 1911, the slide slipped back a little and was out of battery, because the friction of the holster, grabbed the slide and pushed it back slightly. So, out of battery, no bang. I have duplicated it, enough to know that was the issue. So, for this gun, I always carry hammer down on a loaded chamber, because the pressure of the hammer helps ensure that the slide stays in battery. The inertia firing pin makes the gun safe to carry with the hammer all of the way down.
On the Colt 1911, (my favorite carry gun, in Lightweight Commander Configuration) I have had two failures, that happened to otherwise very proven guns, that had been used a lot with basically 100% reliability. Both times, all of a sudden they started jamming and wouldn't feed reliability, or hardly at all, out of the blue, with no warning. Actually, one was a Springfield 5" lightweight gun, and the other was a Colt series 70 steel 5" gun. In both cases it was the extractor. The Colt had seen a lot of use, and the extractor was broken, the Springfield had been shot quite a bit but not 1000's or rounds like the Colt had. It's extractor was not broken but had become out of tune, or adjustment.
I fixed both of them by replacing the extractors with Wilson Bulletproof extractors and adjusted them myself, and they went right back to being 100% reliable, and have been for a long time. These were both proven guns, that I trusted. If it's mechanical, it might possibly fail.
Of course excessively dirty guns will probably eventually fail or start having issues, even revolvers.
My shield has not failed me so far, but there's always that first time. And actually, several of my Commanders have not, so far. But, I have even seen several Glocks fail, but none of my own ever have, except when my daughter has limp-wristed them. With me shooting them, my personal Glocks, have always been 100%. I have had several parts breakage failures with Kimbers, I blame too many MIM parts, regarding them, but over all, they have been pretty good guns.